Conservation International

Project support and awards for conserving terrestrial and marine biological diversity on a global scale

Principal Office: USA

Conservation International (CI) is among the world’s largest non-governmental conservation organizations. It defines its mission as conserving the Earth’s living heritage and global biodiversity, and demonstrating that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature.

CI’s conservation strategy is defined in relation to biodiversity “hot spots,” wilderness areas, and oceans and seascapes from a global perspective. CI supports numerous programs and partnerships for conservation, including grant making to civil society.

1 — Conservation Stewards Program. The CSP works with communities in the form of conservation agreements to protect natural resources that they own or use. CI makes grants to these communities to pay for conservation actions and ecosystem services, and to offset lost opportunity in the case of previous resource extraction.

CI makes grants for feasibility studies, followed by grants for longer-term implementation. CI seeks to establish endowments to provide continuous funding, and it invites partners (i.e., private, local government, and multilateral) to offer conservation sponsorships.

Grants for implementation in CSP are to local and indigenous communities in the conservation regions and corridors that comprise CI’s strategy.

3 — Carbon Fund. The Carbon Fund provides funding for the design and start-up of forest restoration and conservation projects that sequester atmospheric carbon. The Fund aids in the commercialization of carbon credits, and it offers companies a way to include forest carbon credits in their voluntary commitments to address climate change.